The test, developed at USC, "appears to be a very powerful test and better than anything else we know of for predicting recurrence," says Richard Cote, professor of pathology and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC. Current trials are also using the test to find hidden metastases in lymph nodes and bone marrow for breast and lung cancers.

The study, "Detection of Occult Lymph Node Metastases in Patients with Local Advanced (pT3) Node-Negative Prostate Cancer" appears this week in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Prostate cancer is the most common non-skin cancer in America, according to the Prostate Cancer Foundation. One in six American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, making men 35 percent more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than women are to be diagnosed with breast cancer.

"Thanks to greater awareness, as well as increased and improved screening, we see men increasingly diagnosed with prostate cancer in its early stages," Cote says. "Most of these patients will do very well and will not require treatment beyond surgery or radiation therapy to cure their disease."

But a proportion of these patients have metastases of the prostate cancer appear later, even when the lymph nodes removed at the time of the cancer surgery appeared negative for cancer, he says.

Cote and his colleagues looked at 3,914 lymph nodes from 180 patients who were staged as having lymph nodes negative for cancer based on standardized histologic evaluation (visual scan under a microscope). The lymph nodes were then evaluated for occult (hidden) metastases using new specific immunohistochemistry tests that can detect cancer on a cell-by-cell
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Contact: Jon Weiner
jon.weiner@usc.edu
323-442-2830
University of Southern California
20-Jun-2006